Forgotten lore: Ars reviews newest board game obsession, Crows

Crows combines great art with a fun, easy to play concept for 1 to 4 players. …

Crows is a brand new tile-based board game from Tyler Sigman, the man who brought the excellent PlayStation Network game Hoard to life. Sigman is never going to get rich designing games like these, but I'll be damned if he's not making our lives just a little bit more fun. That's definitely worth a tip of the hat.

The concept behind Crows is simple, and the game is easy to learn. You must use your shiny object to draw the attention of the birds and get them to flock to you, and the more crows that end their turn on your square the higher your score. Each round has the players pick and play a tile, place their shiny object, use a special tile, and then the birds flock. It's deeper than it sounds on paper.

The depth is there

The game begins with nine tiles placed down, and then the wooden crows are placed on the board. Each tile has a number of crows on a tree, and when the tile is played you place that number of wooden crows on that tile. The crows have their own turn, and can move up, down, left, or right, and they will always move towards the nearest shiny object placed by the player. Your goal is to attract a large number of crows, and that's harder than it seems with another player working against you.

The game begins!

The crows will always move towards the nearest shiny object, but by placing your shiny object on a pile of trinkets, another kind of tile in the deck, you can break ties and make your object more attractive. If you place your shiny object on a graveyard, all the crows that are drawn to you are worth double the points. By placing a garbage pile token you can interrupt the flow of birds by forcing them to land and have a snack for a turn. Play goes by quickly, and strategy constantly adjusts depending on the moves of the other players. There is a definite advantage to being the last player to move, but just like in Poker there is a "first player" chit that moves around the board to make sure the players act in differing orders.

The board grows

If you place your shiny object on a tree with no birds drawn on it, you can pull a special token. These can create graveyards on any tile, or negate the effects of a graveyard, or even keep a flock of crows from moving for a turn. These cards can do a lot to screw the other players out of points, or to make your own moves much more profitable. How you place the tiles, where you place your shiny object, and what cards you play all work together to determine how the crows move, what moves are available to the other players, and how many points are at stake. Again, it's an easy game to learn, but strategy can become both subtle and mean-spirited. I played many rounds with my wife, and was often kicked under the table.

That being said, she usually won.

Trying to describe how these games work without actually sitting down in front of the pieces themselves can be tricky, but the guys at Valley Games put together a charming little video showing off the game's mechanics and some of the strategy behind it. Take a look and you'll see the game's clean, attractive art, as well as the Crow pieces. The tiles are thick and easy to use.

Crows

We spoke with Tyler Sigman about the design of the game, and it all came together very quickly. "I was becoming increasingly interested and fascinated by crows and ravens, and I just kind of off-handedly asked my friend, who's a crow enthusiast, what they do," he told Ars. "She said 'they like shiny objects.' The mechanic really sort of just popped into my head immediately." The rest of the game's wrinkles came later, but the core mechanic is sound, and the game's aesthetics and theme really help to set it apart in the world of board games, tiles or not.

"As a funny point of trivia, the birds move like rooks in chess, and a name for a type of crow or raven is a 'rook,'" Sigman said. "The funny part of that is that I never made that connection until well after the game was designed."

This is a game that has really grabbed my family, and everything from the art to the speed of play makes it a refreshing play. Creating a simple, fun mechanic like this is tricky, much harder than a more complex game, and Sigman pulled it off very well. You can buy your own copy from a number of places, or support your local gaming and comic store. If you wanted a board game to introduce to your older children, or wife-slash-husband, this is a very good place to start.